Young Women Aren’t Sold on Hillary Clinton

Will young women rally behind Hillary Clinton? According to Molly Mirhashem at the National Journal, Mrs. Clinton “needs them to be a base of her grassroots efforts, as fired up as young people were for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.” But she may have a tough road ahead of her, because a Hillary Clinton presidency doesn’t look like a victory to every young feminist.

Ms. Mirhashem talked to 47 young women and found many who were less than excited about Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. For 20-year-old Sylvie Edman, for instance, Mrs. Clinton represents “corporate feminism,” or “empowering women who are already powerful.”

As Ms. Mirhashem notes, some feminists and other activists have long argued that issues of gender are inextricable from those of racial and economic justice. But these arguments have found wider audiences than ever with the rise of social media, which has provided a big platform for thinkers, many of them young women of color, who are exploring the interplay among gender, race and class, as well as issues that affect transgender people, indigenous Americans, and people with disabilities. Young women have access to a wider range of feminist thought than ever before, and much of it focuses on the ways that government and business subject a variety of people to injustice, not on women’s successes at the highest levels of government and business.

None of this means the problems facing women who are already powerful have been solved. In 2008, a heckler told Hillary Clinton to iron his shirt; last year, Chelsea Clinton’s pregnancy and the birth of her daughter inspired some to ask whether Mrs. Clinton might prefer to spend time with her grandchild than run for president (a question rarely asked of, say, Mitt Romney, whose seventeenth and eighteenth grandchildren were born during his presidential campaign). Donald Trump’s Twitter account also recently shared (then deleted) a tweet reading, “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?”

But there’s a growing concern that solving those problems won’t necessarily solve the ones that affect women who aren’t presidential candidates — problems like unlivable wages, a broken social safety net and mass incarceration. Would a President Clinton be more likely to solve these than, say, the last President Clinton? Some of the young women Ms. Mirhashem interviewed were not sure. As 17-year-old Sam Viqueira tells Ms. Mirhashem, “I think it’s problematic to assume that just because she’s a woman, she’s the best spokesperson for all women.”

Still, doubts like Ms. Viqueira’s have the potential to make Mrs. Clinton a better advocate for women. According to Ms. Mirhashem, the Clinton campaign is no longer taking women’s support as a given, and is taking pains to demonstrate Mrs. Clinton’s commitment to racial and economic equality — she cites Mrs. Clinton’s recent comment that the wage gap is wider for women of color than for white women.

The election of America’s first female president, whenever it happens, will demonstrate that a female candidate can win the country’s highest office, which is no small thing. But it won’t necessarily mean better lives for other women in America, for people of color, for people living in poverty. Young women around the country know this, and if Mrs. Clinton wants their support, she’s going to have to earn it.